Finally, after a somewhat strenuous Californian vacation (because it was way too short), Iceland’s volcanic ash cloud has forced German Chancellor Angela Merkel to finally take a little more time off her busy schedule than she might usually want to do and reflect and relax a little while vacationing right here in good old Old Europe, perhaps finally making it back to Berlin maybe one day in the process, where everybody has kind of sort of been expecting her irgendwie (somehow).

The first stop of her current European tour began on Friday when her plane was diverted to Portugal. After a night in Lisbon, she flew over to Rome just before the air traffic got canned there too. Then she headed north from Rome to Bolzano in northeast Italy in an armored limousine and is currently, I believe, busing it over the Alps back to Berlin and could be arriving here at any moment or at least anytime within the next week or two (is Rainbow Tours still in business?).

What’s a forty or fifty hour flight back home with planes, trains and automobiles (and buses) as long as you can combine it with some handshakes and photos and a little sight-seeing here and there? And get paid for it, I mean.

“She has, after all, been spared a day of campaigning in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, which holds a crucial election next month which her center-right coalition stands to lose.”